


The Swallows Will Fly

by mystivy



Category: Tennis RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-22
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-07-15 11:20:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16062050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mystivy/pseuds/mystivy
Summary: After Wimbledon 2018, Roger and Rafa meet in Ibiza.





	The Swallows Will Fly

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Lucy, who always lets me mooch off her amazing skills and sensitivity as a beta reader. ;) And Antonia for her feedback too. :)

Out across the pool the grass is parched under the midday sun and sparrows flit among the palm trees, chirping plaintively to each other in the heat of the day. On the other side of the low white wall is a tumbling cliff of red limestone rocks and boulders, and somewhere down the coast to the left is the marina. The sea is a vivid aquamarine that glimmers endlessly to the horizon. A couple of jetskis cut through the water below, too far away to be much more than a distant hum above the susurration of the waves.

Rafa turns when the door slides open behind him. The villa is modern and angular, white oblongs balanced on the jagged native rocks. There are terracotta pots of lavender on the dark wood steps up to the shady veranda, where pale curtains are pulled against the sun. He climbs the steps and Roger throws his arms around him. “You look good,” he says, and Rafa slaps his back.

“You look sleepy,” he replies. Roger’s hair is tousled and his face has that soft look of a late morning in bed. He hasn’t shaved in a few days. His white shirt is loose and open at the chest, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. 

He smiles a little, caught. “I slept late,” he says. “No kids around, you know?”

Rafa nods. The villa is large and feels strangely silent. Usually when they happen to be in the same place in the world, Roger asks him to visit and the kids are all over him. Lenny shows him a new book while Leo challenges him to arm wrestle across the corner of the table, and the girls roll their eyes and smile at him, sharing a look of knowing maturity and talking to him about much more grown-up things, like ponies and new stationery and how they like to wear their hair. Rafa listens earnestly and Mirka laughs behind her hand.

None of that this time. Just the cicadas and the distant sea and the faint smell of dry earth and lavender in the hot afternoon. A lizard takes short, urgent breaths on the veranda wall.

“I called them to bring up lunch,” Roger says, gesturing vaguely back inside. “You want a beer?”

“Didn’t you just wake up?” 

Roger shrugs and smiles a little. “I’m on vacation,” he says, and he heads inside for a moment. Rafa can hear the fridge door and then the snick and hiss of a bottle opener, and Roger emerges with two bottles of San Miguel. He hands one to Rafa and clinks them together, then strolls out to the pool. He has sunglasses on now. “Are you staying anywhere? Or just on the boat?”

“On the boat,” Rafa says, following him as he seems to want to wander around the garden. 

“What have you been up to? You looked tanned.” Roger grins at him and Rafa can see those little eye teeth.

“I went to that club last night. The one you said to me you went to. And this morning I was swimming, I think over there. Kind of over there.” He’s not sure from here, when he can’t see the marina, but he points vaguely over in the direction of the cove where they’d been leaping off the boat into the sea.

“Sounds about right for you,” Roger says, looking over his sunglasses. There’s a look in his eyes Rafa wishes he could decipher. Roger seems restless, poking at a spiky shrub in the garden with his bare foot. “What is this?” he says. There are tall, golden flowers sprouting from the centre of its fleshy leaves. “Do you know what this is? You’re from around here.”

Rafa wouldn’t call Manacor and anywhere on Ibiza especially close, but he guesses it’s a matter of perspective. “It’s aloe,” he says. “Good for things on the skin, no? Bites or something.” There are several in the garden at home. His mother would cut a leaf and rub it on nettle stings and insect bites when he was little, or if he got sunburned from being out on the beach all day.

“Oh, that’s aloe?” Roger says. “I’ve seen this in the Maldives. I didn’t know that’s what it was.”

“Yeah,” Rafa says, taking a mouthful of beer. He lifts his face to the sun and takes a deep breath. “So where are the kids? And Mirka?”

“They went back to Switzerland yesterday,” Roger says.

“You didn’t go with them?” he asks, perhaps a moment too late.

Roger just shakes his head, slowly swallowing a mouthful of beer and gazing at him inscrutably from behind his sunglasses. They’re not so dark that Rafa can’t see his eyes. “Anyway,” he says, breaking the silence. “I don’t think I’m going to play Canada.” 

“No?” Rafa says. He’s a little surprised, given Roger’s run at Wimbledon and the fact he was out for months in the spring. “Cincy?”

“Yeah, I’ll play Cincy.” 

Rafa nods. “Everything okay?” He gestures vaguely at Roger’s body. 

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Roger says. “Just want to stay that way, you know?”

“Sure,” Rafa agrees. 

“And you?” Roger asks, with that same gesture.

Rafa shrugs. “Everything good, no?” If he doesn’t count the fairly constant pain he’s used to in his foot, his knee and his hip, everything is fine. That pain is normal, and anyway he’d rather not talk about it. Roger nods in a way that suggests he knows exactly what Rafa isn’t saying. That’s alright. Their bodies have their pains, their public failings, and here, between the two of them, it’s okay to leave them be. “How’s the dog?” The last time Rafa had seen the kids was in Wimbledon when they were fussing around a yapping black dog and holding him awkwardly towards Rafa so he could pet him. Rafa was ginger about it, never quite trusting a pair of jaws snapping about like that.

Roger snorts quietly. “Fine,” he says. “The kids and Mirka adore him.”

“Not you?” Rafa says. 

Roger rubs a toe into the chalky soil at the edge of the grass. “He’s okay,” he says, his little smile betraying a fondness far beyond that.

“My sister got a cat,” says Rafa. “Far less dangerous, Rogi.”

“Bear isn’t dangerous!”

“Bear?” Rafa laughs a little. “You called him Bear?”

“I didn’t call him Bear,” Roger replies. “Leo wanted to call him after Bear Grylls and Lenny seems to think he’ll grow to be the size of a bear. He won’t,” Roger adds, at Rafa’s alarm. “He’s hardly going to grow any more at all.”

“Good,” Rafa says, with relief. He takes another mouthful of beer and lets the bottle dangle from his fingers. From the veranda comes the sound of the door again, and two waiters enter with a trolley of dishes and begin to lay the table. 

“Lunch,” Roger says.

“So you didn’t cook?” Rafa says, teasing him.

“You don’t want to eat anything I cook, I tell you that,” Roger says. He laughs under his breath and swallows some beer, staring out at the sea. Maybe thinking about the same thing Rafa is, the morning he tried to make omelettes and they ended up with a kind of scrambled mix of eggs and chives, some of it burned, and they had to throw it out and Rafa started again. “Well,” says Roger, turning on his bare heel and heading up towards the veranda, where he directs the waiters with a few last things to lay on the table. Rafa follows him once the waiters are gone. Roger gestures to the spread. “No ham, no cheese, no tomatoes,” he says.

Rafa snorts and pulls out a chair. He takes in the dishes of salads, the pita and hummus, the cold salmon served with a creamy dill sauce, the small bowls of gazpacho. “Looks amazing,” he says. He waves away some insect that seems eager to reach the pasta with pine nuts and basil pesto.

“I remember what you like,” Roger says. “Help yourself.” Rafa reaches for the salads and begins to pile food on his plate. “Hungry?” Roger asks him, as he pours them glasses of water.

“Very hungry, no?” Rafa replies. The morning was active and this is a late lunch for him. The others down on the boat have probably already finished lunch an hour ago. They eat and they talk. Roger tells him about the kids, how Charlene is doing so well in school but Myla finds it harder to concentrate, always off somewhere in her own head. Making imaginary maps and writing stories about exploring them. How Leo is athletic and brash and gloriously independent-minded already, while Lenny tends to look to his brother for guidance and they often find him reading by himself, already tackling books beyond his reading age. His pride in them is visible in his face, glowing when he talks about them.

“But, oh my god, I’m probably boring you,” he says, then, interrupting himself.

“No!” Rafa protests. “I love hearing about them, you know that, no?” 

“No, come on. Parents going on about their kids, everyone knows it’s boring.” He’s laughing a little, though, softening it. “Tell me about you. How’s the vacation going? All fun and parties?”

“Yeah, it’s great,” Rafa says, chewing on some pita with hummus. “Snorkelling, you know, swimming. Yesterday Tomeu got stung by a jellyfish.”

“What? Was it bad?”

“No, no, he was fine, just a little one. We googled it. Nothing scary.”

“Did you pee on him?” asks Roger.

“No!” Rafa says, laughing. “We put on the ointment, no? No pee.”

“Good,” Roger says, with feeling.

“What?” Rafa says. “Come on, don’t you like peeing on things? I see you with Bear Grylls, no? Pissing on the fire.” He laughs for real at that, just like he had when he was watching.

“You saw that?”

“Yeah, I saw it. So funny, Rogi.”

Roger shrugs modestly. “It was a lot of fun. My kids are crazy about him, you know?”

“That’s why they called the dog.”

“Yeah.”

Little bubbles of laughter come from deep in Roger’s chest. He remembers how they sounded with his ear against his sternum, the hair on his chest tickling Rafa’s nose. “Anyway,” he says. “Apart from that, it’s good, no? Good vacation. Need to relax.”

“Yeah, it’s good,” Roger agrees. 

“You get time to relax, Rogi?” Rafa asks. 

“Yeah, sure,” Roger says. “The girls have started waterskiing. They really take to it, you know? They’re so good on the snow.”

“Is it the same?”

“Yeah, kind of. They tell me it is, anyway. I can’t do it. Too hard on the back.” He shifts a little in his chair, indicating the place down low where he can have problems sometimes. 

“And hard on the knee for Mirka.” Mirka’s old injury has never quite left her so she doesn’t take to the slopes herself. Or the water.

“Mmm,” Roger agrees. “I want to try a jetski, though. I never have.”

“No?” Rafa loves jetskiing. “I bring you sometime. Next time we come here, tell me, we go jetskiing.”

“Okay,” Roger agrees. “Sounds like fun.” He’s quiet for a moment, frowning a little, and then he clears his throat a bit and breaks it. “Hey, you want another beer?” He’s already pushing his chair back, hardly waiting for Rafa’s response. “Vacation, right?” He offers Rafa a conspiratorial kind of smile as he heads back inside.

Rafa shrugs and accepts another bottle when Roger returns. He pours them both glasses of cold water, too.

“So how’s the family, Raf?” Roger asks, eating the last of the food from his plate. 

Rafa picks at his pasta and swallows slowly. “Pretty good,” he says. “Everyone healthy, happy, no? Toni is doing well. Spending a lot of time in the Academy, working hard, as usual. He’s training a lot with Jaume and a few others who look good.”

“Yeah, that kid is doing well,” Roger says. 

“Yeah, we’re happy, no? And some of the others, too.” Rafa is proud of his kids from the Academy, and judging by Roger’s warm smile, his pride shows.

“And your parents?” Roger asks.

Rafa finds it difficult to talk about his parents with Roger. Their break up, nearly ten years ago now, is always inextricably bound in his mind with how it ended between the two of them. Things were never quite the same after that. “They’re fine,” he says, and he leaves it there. Roger regards him for a moment, as if he’s reading his mind, and Rafa pushes his chair back a little so he can cross his legs and look out towards the sea. There’s a niche in the wall where the curtains hang and someone has left a book there, a bookmark sticking out part way through. “Yours?” he asks, pointing towards it with his index finger as he keeps a hold of his beer bottle.

“Mirka’s,” Roger says. “I guess she forgot it.”

“You read it?”

“No,” Roger says. “But I saw the movie.”

It’s so much easier to talk about movies and TV shows than his parents or anything personal. He tells Roger he’s been watching _Suits_ and _Stranger Things_ , and Roger tells him what he’s been watching, and they go back and forth for a while finding points of interconnection. “I saw some episodes of _Suits_ a while back,” Roger says. “There are… nice suits.” He laughs a little and Rafa laughs too.

“Yeah,” he agrees.

Once, it was easy to be silent with Roger. Now there’s a prickle to it. Overhead a pair of swallows fly to and from a little mud nest above the security light on the wall and there’s loud, demanding chirps coming from inside. It must be a second brood, Rafa thinks, aware enough of the swallows around his own house in Porto Cristo to figure out the timing. “They’re lovely, aren’t they?” Roger says, following his eyes. “I had to stop the resort guys from knocking the nest down the other day. They didn’t seem too happy. The kids would have been so upset, though. Lenny watched them almost the whole time he was here.”

They fly off again and dance in the air above the palm trees, snapping at the insects and flying back, then away, endless industry. Rafa feels deeply lethargic in comparison, the afternoon sun and the beer going to his head a little. He drinks about half his water in one go. “So how long are you staying?” he asks. 

Roger shrugs, picking a little at the label on his bottle. “I just wanted to see you,” he says. He takes off his glasses and leaves them on the table, but then he squints out at the garden and the sun blazing on the top of the veranda wall and puts them on again. “I wanted to see if you’d changed your mind about the Laver Cup.”

Rafa takes a deep breath, blowing it out through his cheeks and shakes his head. “I don’t think so,” he says. “Not after Davis Cup, no?” Roger nods as if he’s not surprised at all. It’s hardly the kind of thing he had to stay here to ask, hardly a reason to stay behind after his family had left. It could have been cleared up with a text. The lizard on the wall suddenly darts behind it and is gone. “Anyway, Novak will be there, no?” Rafa says. 

Roger raises an eyebrow at that, as if Rafa has said something faintly ridiculous. “I don’t care about Novak,” he says, quietly. It makes Rafa feel a little raw, some abrasion in his soul at the tone in Roger’s voice. The weight.

“Geneva will be easier for me,” Rafa says. He doesn’t know what makes him say it. Some desire to comfort him, lift whatever weight is making his shoulders slump. “If you want me there.”

“I’ll want you there,” Roger says, sitting up again and taking another mouthful of beer. His eyes are fixed on something in the garden. Sunlight reflects off the surface of the pool and dances on the ceiling of the veranda, and the swallows are little darts of gold when they pass through it.

“Remember when you won Wimbledon, the time you beat Andy Roddick? In 2009,” Rafa says. Roger turns to look at him silently. “The day was like this, in Mallorca. Hot and sunny like this.” He means the way the air feels, the silence, the gentle hush of the leaves, the glare of whitewashed walls. That day, after he watched Roger win on TV, he sat out on the deck of his home in Porto Cristo and his father came to him and told him that he and his mother were going to give it another shot. Rafa shakes his head a little, at a loss to explain to Roger why he mentioned that day now. “Just reminds me, no?” he says, feeling a little foolish.

“You know what it reminds me of?” Roger says, after a moment or two. Rafa shakes his head. “Your house in La Romana.” Roger is gazing straight at him, almost like a challenge, but maybe it’s more of an invitation. An invitation to remember the week they spent in the Dominican Republic one year straight after Miami, when it was already hot and the sun was blinding, and they spent their days naked by the pool and the nights naked in bed. They were intoxicated with each other then. It felt like a fever. 

Sweat curls Roger’s hair at his neck, soaking a little into the collar of his white shirt. Not the curls he used to have, the ones that dripped sweat down his back, that Rafa would hold on to or bury his nose in. There’s a sheen of sweat on the soft, slightly pale skin on the inside of Rafa’s elbows. He crosses one arm in front of his body and holds on to the other as if to hide it from view. “I see what you mean,” he says. The garden in La Romana is far more tropical and bursting with leaves and fruit and flowers, but it feels like this on some afternoons. It’s the time of day when most people are taking a siesta. The time of day when they would have gone to bed together or slept entwined on the lounger by the pool. Rafa picks up his water and drinks what’s left in his glass and Roger reaches across the table and refills it.

“Do you ever think of it?” Roger asks. He glances at Rafa and away again. “Those times. Those years.”

“No,” Rafa replies. He drains his second beer. Roger stands up and Rafa thinks he’s about to go inside for another bottle but he just stands near the steps of the veranda and the sunlight dapples on his face. 

“I do,” he says. It’s clear he knows Rafa is lying. It’s only when he says that that he turns and fetches two more beers from inside. Rafa doesn’t feel like he should drink another but he takes the bottle anyway. The relentless cicadas are buzzing in his head a little and it’s too hot. There’s no more breeze. The curtains are still. He wishes he was on his boat so he could jump into the sea.

“Why?” he asks. The question is out of his mouth before he even thinks about it. Roger is standing by the steps again, leaning one shoulder against the white column. He’s heard the question but he thinks before he answers. 

“Because I was happy,” he says. 

“You aren’t happy now?”

“I am.” He’s being truthful, Rafa can see that. “But I was happy then, too. I think…” He sighs heavily, his head drooping. “I think we could have been happy.”

Rafa snorts. “You think so.” Roger turns sharply to look at him, the lines of a frown visible above his sunglasses. His face is aging. He looks like a husband. A dad. He could have been those things either way. He doesn’t say anything. He just turns back to the garden and wanders down the steps, not even checking to see if Rafa is following. Rafa lets him go, but then he makes himself stand up and walk after him. “It was your choice,” he says.

Roger looks back. His eyes are deep in shadow. “I know,” he replies.

There are bees buzzing around the lavender, blind to the danger of the swallows flitting in and out around them. Rafa steps down onto the stones surrounding the pool. “So what do you want?”

Roger lets his head falls and he seems to be considering this for the first time. The ground must be hot underneath his bare feet because he moves to the grass. “I want to remember,” he says. “I’m tired of not being able to talk about it with anyone. With you.”

Rafa kicks at the edge of a flagstone. There’s a little weed growing up from the crack, a tiny thing, a flower about to bloom. He’s tired of remembering. Tired of every little detail coming back to him at strange times. The smell of Roger’s skin in the morning, the way he used to smile when he woke up, the way he kissed Rafa’s body, the curve of his throat, the inside of his elbows. Tired of waking up in the night and finding it still aches deep down inside him that Roger’s not there. “I don’t think I’m the person to talk to, Rogi,” he says.

“You’re the only person to talk to,” Roger replies. Rafa just shakes his head and silence falls between them. “You want to take a swim?” says Roger after a moment.

“No,” Rafa says. “I should go.”

“A walk? There’s a path down that way.”

“No,” Rafa says again.

Roger sighs heavily. “I want you to stay.”

“I…” Rafa says, though he has nothing to follow it with. After a moment he says, “I don’t think I should stay.”

“I’m not flying out until tomorrow.”

“Well. You have a book.”

“Rafa.”

They’re quiet again. The day is taking on the bronze patina of late afternoon. The jetskiers have disappeared. A few fishing boats are heading out from the port a little way down the coast, cutting white lines into the surface of the sea that fade to an oily calm behind them. 

“Would it be so bad?” Roger says. “To have what we had before?”

“What did we have before? I didn’t have nothing before.” He swallows some beer and tries to make himself leave. It would be easier if he wasn’t drowning in memories of what he had then. The sex, the affection. Roger’s body in the night. How many times he’s wanted this, he’s wanted to fall to his knees and beg him to come back, seduce him back, suck him till he came deep and hard and remembered everything they’ve lost.

“Nothing,” Roger echoes. 

“Not enough.”

Roger swills his beer around in the bottle. “What if I told you I’d leave her?”

“You’ll never leave her.”

The cicadas are getting louder in the late afternoon sun. “No,” Roger says quietly, almost to himself. “I’ll never leave her.”

Rafa takes the steps back up to the veranda and Roger doesn’t follow. He leaves his bottle on the table, still half full. Above him the swallows dart to and fro and all around him is the thickness of the coming evening. He will leave and they will continue to fly, the cicadas will continue to chirp, and down below the waves will beat endlessly against the rocks turning red as the sun descends towards the horizon. All this endless time and they had some of it, the two of them, for a while. And there was love, and there was joy. He will walk away and maybe this is it, the real end of it all. Roger is standing at the far wall between the palm trees, gazing out at the sea. “I’m going,” Rafa calls across the pool and the garden, and Roger turns. There’s nothing left to read in his face, nothing to see in his shadowed eyes. 

“Bye, Rafa,” he says, and that’s all there is left to say.


End file.
